Jewish Population and Identity: Concept and Reality

262 Pages·2018·5.546 MB·English

by  Sergio DellaPergola, Uzi Rebhun

Studies of Jews in Society 1
Sergio DellaPergola
Uzi Rebhun
Editors
Jewish Population
and Identity
Concept and Reality
In honor of
Sidney Goldstein
Studies of Jews in Society
Volume 1
Series Editor
Charles Kadushin, Brandeis University
Studies of Jews in Society focuses on social scientific studies of Jewry, and takes a
broad perspective on “social science”, to include anthropology, communications,
demography, economics, education, ethnography, geography, history, politics,
population, social psychology, and sociology. Books may rely on quantitative
methods, qualitative methods, or both.
The series is directed to social scientists and general scholars in Jewish studies as
well as those generally interested in religion and ethnicity; academics who teach
Jewish studies; undergraduates and graduate students in Jewish studies, sociologists
interested in religion and ethnicity; communal professionals and lay leaders who
deal with Jewish organizations and individuals. The style, while rigorous scientifi-
cally, is accessible to a general audience.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8879
Sergio DellaPergola • Uzi Rebhun
Editors
Jewish Population and
Identity
Concept and Reality
In honor of Sidney Goldstein
Editors
Sergio DellaPergola Uzi Rebhun
Institute of Contemporary Jewry Institute of Contemporary Jewry
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel Jerusalem, Israel
ISSN 2524-4302 ISSN 2524-4310 (electronic)
Studies of Jews in Society
ISBN 978-3-319-77445-9 ISBN 978-3-319-77446-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77446-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940869
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
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Series Editor’s Introduction
This is the first volume in the new Association for the Social Scientific Study of
Jewry (ASSJ) Book Series, Studies of Jews in Society, published by Springer. It is
fitting to be the first in the new series for several reasons. The book editors are inter-
nationally distinguished as demographers and writers on Jewish subjects. The topic
of the book is the great diversity in the ways Jews have been counted both in the
past, in many countries and cultures, thus reminding us that there is much more to
world Jewry than contemporary Israel and the United States. The editors have
assembled internationally renowned experts whose first task is explicitly or implic-
itly to discover who in different times, cultures, and countries is considered a Jew.
Demography thus goes to the core question of Jewish identity – an identity deter-
mined by non-Jews and by Jews themselves.
In legendary times as recounted in Shemot, 38, 26, who was a member of tribes
of the Sons of Israel (benai yisrarel) was assumed to be obvious, even if the actual
method of counting them (beka’ lagulgolet – a beka’ a head, that is half a shekel for
every adult person) was not. Since then and especially in post emancipation times,
the issue of Jewish identity, arguably the core problem of Jewish studies, has been
the subject of much research and religious and political controversy. But in order to
count Jews, the first task of Jewish demography is to determine who is a Jew – who
others think is a Jew and who Jews themselves think is a Jew. This book therefore
lays the foundation for all the books that will come in this series.
CMJS, Brandeis University Charles Kadushin
Waltham, MA, USA
v
Introduction: Concept and Reality in Jewish
Demography
This volume is part of the series of Studies of Jews in Society sponsored by the
Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry – ASSJ. The volume is also a
continuation of the series Jewish Population Studies, which over more than 40 years
issued 30 volumes under the aegis of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This book addresses some of the fundamentals of Jewish demography and soci-
ology around the world. It is concerned with not only documenting patterns of pop-
ulation change but also an intriguing and ever-present issue like “Who Is a Jew?”
The latter transcends the limits of quantitative assessment and deeply delves into the
nature, boundaries, and quality of group identification. A growing challenge is how
to bridge between concept – related to ideals and theory – and reality – reflecting
field research. The volume represents the dynamic and diverse nature of the study of
Jewish populations globally and locally. It shows how specific case studies can pro-
vide an important contribution to the broader and now rapidly expanding study of
religious and ethnic groups.
Scholars from different disciplines – history, geography, sociology, economics,
political science, social psychology, and especially demography – follow and ana-
lyze the social and cultural patterns of Jews in different places across the globe, at
various times and from complementary subject matter perspectives. Historical
sources that have recently been explored and turned accessible, new censuses under-
taken by national governments, and especially designed surveys sponsored by
research bodies and by Jewish organizations offer continually expanding opportuni-
ties to ask new questions and to uncover yet unknown aspects of the past and present
Jewish experience. A multiplicity of sophisticated analytical methods can be
employed to study population trends and their interrelations with other societal pro-
cesses at the individual and collective levels.
While some of the new findings presented in this volume attest to the consistency
of Jewish demographic and identification patterns over time, they also point to vari-
ation, evolution, and ramifications in new and sometimes unpredicted directions.
These old and new developments reflect general processes occurring in the different
areas and societies where Jews live, internal changes within Jewish communities, as
vii
viii Introduction: Concept and Reality in Jewish Demography
well as intra- and intergenerational trends affecting individual choices of religious
and ethnic orientations.
Jews can be viewed as a religious group, or as an ethnic group, or probably better
as a blend of these two main variables together with several other captions like a
shared history, memory, nationality, culture, social networks, folklore, organiza-
tional systems, and more. Until the recent past, the study of such groups was per-
ceived by some observers as slightly parochial and removed from a normative
mainstream of integration and generalization of societal and cultural patterns. Today,
however, the growing interest in the study of religious and ethnic groups is an
unquestionable leading trend in the social sciences. The exponential growth in schol-
arly conferences and publications in the field testifies of such accrued interest.
The revival of particularistic group identities and the enhanced effort to docu-
ment and understand them have deeply impacted on contemporary national,
regional, and world politics. Beyond broader strategic concerns related to civiliza-
tional cleavages and conflicts at the global level, different community identities and
group allegiances exert great impact on economic markets and dynamics, social
stratification, local and national voting patterns, international migration and differ-
ential population growth, culture and popular tastes, and gender cleavages, namely
the very nature of contemporary societies. Jews have often been among the forerun-
ners in the emerging coexistence or perhaps better competition between particular
and general identities, separated and integrated human development, innovation and
conservation, and conflict and convergence. Examples are provided by studies of
demographic transitions from high-to-low mortality and fertility levels; mutations
in socioeconomic characteristics; mass and selective international and internal
migrations; and more recently the effects of globalization, transnationalism, and
multiculturalism on personal and group identities.
Jews, more than other groups, have a long history of survival as minorities among
host societies and, as such, have displayed all possible forms of separatism, adapta-
tion, integration, or assimilation in the most disparate contexts. Their peculiar
demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and trends reflect a blend of the
normative system and organizational web peculiar to the group and its history; of
the general conditions shared by Jews and non-Jews at a given point of time and
place; and of the nature of interaction between Jews and others as a reflection of the
existence or lack of legal constraints. Lessons learned from Jewish communities
have in the past and may today help monitor the trajectories followed by other
minorities, either migrant or otherwise culturally different. In each of these many
subject areas, Jewish experiences often served as a paradigm for the development of
broader social patterns, which in turn generated the emerging of new social
theories.
In order to escape the temptations and risks of apologetic discourse about eth-
noreligious minorities and particularly about the Jewish collective, impartial and
verifiable social scientific research tools need to be developed and applied. This
involves systematic access to adequate data, and where those data are lacking or
incomplete, investing energies to develop new sources of reliable information. But
above the necessary raw materials, and beyond a crucially important critical
Introduction: Concept and Reality in Jewish Demography ix
approach to their reliability, quality, and consistency, one needs a steady effort of
conceptualization and standardization of the symbolic and cultural world of con-
tents pertinent to a given group, and of the personal and community boundaries
stemming from that. In addition, it is imperative to make use of a wide range of
measurements and evaluation tools, which may include family reconstruction from
genealogical materials, systematic data processing from large-scale population cen-
suses or surveys, analytic refinement through inference models or structure similar-
ity approaches, and fine-tuning through fieldwork with small focus groups.
As far as the Jewish population is concerned, it is remarkable how these substan-
tive and methodological concerns have recently returned to the center of a lively
debate. The definition, quantitative evaluation, and structural appraisal of Jews –
primarily at the local level, and as a derivative at the global level – constitute an
ever-growing theme in recent scholarship and public discourse. Clearly and to a
growing extent, quantitative estimates of Jewish populations reflect the criteria
adopted by scholars and others to define and circumscribe them. These boundaries
have been shifting over time. One main stimulus to such variation was the increas-
ing frequency of marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and the consequent multi-
ple and not necessarily mutually exclusive options emerging in the transmission of
group identification from one generation to the next. But also – somewhat indepen-
dently – the rise of secularism and the free reinvention of single and multiple identi-
ties contributed to make more complex the characterization and delimitation of
ethnoreligious groups, hence their quantification.
In the past, within the society of a given country, there could exist worlds apart
where different legal systems applied to those who belonged to different religious or
ethnic groups, thus involving a legal determination of group boundaries. Equally
rigid rules of socioeconomic stratification and impenetrable walls of mutual preju-
dice prevailed. All of this progressively turned into social systems characterized by
greater fluidity and porosity of identifications, relativization and multiplicity of
options, and in our specific case, the end of dichotomy between being Jewish and
being non-Jewish. These changes made the study of Jewish populations more chal-
lenging and elusive.
Controversies over the number of Jews are actually not new. Both Jewish popula-
tion censuses in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania toward the end of the eighteenth
century and contemporary surveys in the US and other contemporary societies – all
discussed in this volume – allow much space for criticism and interpretation, adjust-
ment, and recalculation of the apparent results. The reasons for a certain amount of
indetermination in the findings have changed substantially but abundant space for
reaching somewhat different conclusions facing the same tabular evidence has per-
sisted all throughout modern and contemporary Jewish history and demography.
Escaping from a straightforward Jewish self-identification once upon a time could
be explained by the hope to avoid state taxation based on the number of counted
Jews, and later tended to involve persons of Jewish background lacking interest in,
or even awareness of one’s own belonging to the same community.
The already noted variation in the contents of Jewish identification over time also
needs to be given attention. For a long span of time, the Jews were recognized by
x Introduction: Concept and Reality in Jewish Demography
others – often with a sense of hostility – and by self – often with a sense of self-
defense – as a religious group which at the same time constituted a separate nation
or what in modern terms is defined as an ethnic group. But the pace of resilience and
change of both religious and national feelings were unequal over time, thus causing
a diminishing overlap between these two dimensions of identification that initially
quite perfectly coincided with each other. The emergence of national Jews lacking
interest in religion, and of religious Jews lacking interest in the ethnonational
dimension, created more complex identification boundaries which were further
enriched by exclusive or complementary foci on Jewish history, culture, folklore,
and family memories, without necessarily adopting the more stringent parameters
of the initial religious-national cluster. Since 1948, the existence of the state of
Israel has constituted still one more possible focus of Jewish identification, alone or
in combination with any of the preceding ones.
The quantitative and qualitative dimensions of population and identity hence
tend to become less distinct and separate. Researchers, while specializing in specific
fields of investigation, increasingly need to be conversant with a broader array of
theoretical approaches and technical tools in order to be able to describe the trends
and identify their challenges. No final conclusion can be reached without previously
examining different strands of evidence, and evaluating the ones in the light of the
others. This leads to the quite obvious and nonetheless pertinent observation that
one imperative component of Jewish sociodemographic research should be its com-
parativistic character: between Jews and others in the same locality, between differ-
ent Jewish communities across localities, and between the same Jewish community
observed at different points in time. The question whether similar features charac-
terize different Jewish populations is fundamental along with the parallel question
of the similarity or dissimilarity, convergence or divergence of Jewish and other
populations on a variety of processes and markers. In the present volume, these dif-
ferent options are exemplified perhaps more through the juxtaposition of different
case studies than in the direct comparison of different cases within the same article.
Without doubt, however, research reported here illustrates some of the traits shared
among Jews in different parts of the world more than among Jews and non-Jews in
the same place. Examples concern the modes of urbanization, educational attain-
ment and social class, immigrant absorption and their negotiation with the veteran
pre-existing society, the evolution of family models, and, as noted, the transforma-
tion of patterns of group identity. The different continental contexts within which
the Jewish experience unfolds do of course contribute important variable stimuli
and constraints and determine differences and variations – probably more in terms
of the speed of a certain process than in terms of its intrinsic peculiarities.
In the ongoing research debate about minorities, diasporas, and transnationalism,
Jewish studies have provided a great contribution which is still potentially growing.
It has helped in the development of several important paradigms and theories of
general import, although sometimes in the literature the Jewish case study is still
unjustly treated with diffidence as too limited and peculiar and relegated to the mar-
gins of general scholarly discourse.